Do you know what is potentially worse than hard coding values into your source? Soft coding. Why? First a definition:

Soft coding is the act of writing code so that it depends on external settings such that behavior may change without updating the source.

The reason we hard code is because we are lazy and don’t know any better expect that given conditions will never change. Soft coding is born out of opposite reasons. Soft coding is intended to accommodates business rule units subject to change so that application modifications can occur without forcing code pushes or deployments. Soft coding is often seen in the form of configuration files.

Used cautiously soft coding can provide ways to make code become dynamic (switching logging formats, web service URLs, using reflection to create different business objects, etc.). When used in excess, soft coding complicates code by over-abstraction and develops into an anti-pattern.

<BizRuleEngine>

<RedirectToImageProcessor>

<ifexpression=“inparameters[0] > inconditions[0]“>

<inparameters>size</inparameters>

<inconditions>value</inconditions>

<processorref=“BizRuleEngine.ImgProcessor, BizRuleEngine“ />

</if>

</RedirectToImageProcessor>

</BizRuleEngine>

Below are a few of the pitfalls that I’ve run into with soft coding:

Increase of complexity: Developing dynamic code based on configuration values is essentially equal to writing another new language. The problem here is that we try to account for every possible scenario by making the code capable of doing things that will never be done. This results in spaghetti code and it just gets messy.

Development complications: Code is written in an IDE because it can interpret the grammar and check for syntactical errors. Debugging is a breeze in most cases. Again, we are writing a new language and the problem is that we often don’t put as much time and effort into this portion of it. A lot of room is left open for loopholes and unaccounted conditions, while increasing the possibility that an unexpected exception will occur.

End-user error: MY opinion is that this is a big issue for CMS sites. Developers spend lots of time building out the site, making it template based, and hand it over. The new owners then proceed to make content changes that bring the site to its knees.

The better your software is when produced, the less customization it will really need and the less users will find that they wish to change it.